Jillian C. York

Jillian C. York

Director for International Freedom of Expression

Jillian C. York is EFF's Director for International Freedom of Expression and is based in Berlin, Germany. Her work examines state and corporate censorship and its impact on culture and human rights. At EFF, she currently works on several projects, including Surveillance Self-Defense and Onlinecensorship.org. Jillian's writing has been featured in Motherboard, the Guardian, Quartz, the Washington Post, and the New York Times, among others. She is also a regular speaker at global events.

Prior to joining EFF, Jillian worked at Harvard's Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, where she researched Internet censorship. In a previous life, she lived in Morocco and worked as an English teacher and travel writer.

Jillian holds a BA in Sociology from Binghamton University, where—like a surprisingly large number of individuals in her field—she also studied theatre. She alternately resides in the Internet or on an airplane and can often be found blogging or tweeting, as @jilliancyork.

Deeplinks Posts by Jillian C.

The free and open Internet has enabled disparate communities to come together across miles and borders, and empowered marginalized communities to share stories, art, and information with one another and the broader public—but restrictive and often secretive or poorly messaged policies by corporate gatekeepers threaten to change that. Content policies...

A decade ago, before social media was a widespread phenomenon and blogging was still a nascent activity, it was nearly unthinkable outside of a handful of countries—namely China, Tunisia, Syria, and Iran—to detain citizens for their online activity. Ten years later, the practice has become all too common, and remains...

Correction—August 7, 2018: Although Facebook found connections between accounts linked to Russia's Internet Research Agency (IRA) and the accounts connected to the canceled event, a post by Chief Security Officer Alex Stamos states that Facebook is not attributing the "coordinated inauthentic behavior" of these accounts to a specific group or...

The hope that filled Egypt's Internet after the 2011 January 25 uprising has long since faded away. In recent years, the country's military government has instead created a digital dystopia, pushing once-thriving political and journalism communities into closed spaces or offline, blocking dozens of websites, and arresting...

“YouTube keeps deleting evidence of Syrian chemical weapon attacks” “Azerbaijani faces terrorist propaganda charge in Georgia for anti-Armenian Facebook post” “Medium Just Took Down A Post It Says Doxed ICE Employees” These are just a sampling of recent headlines relating to the regulation of user-generated online content, an increasingly controversial...

Update: On June 5, 2018, authorities extended Abbas' detention for another fifteen days. We will continue to post updates on his plight here.When we wrote of award-winning journalist Wael Abbas being silenced by social media platforms in February, we never suspected that those suspensions would reach beyond the...

People in marginalized communities who are targets of persecution and violence—from the Rohingya in Burma to Native Americans in North Dakota—are using social media to tell their stories, but finding that their voices are being silenced online. This is the tragic and unjust consequence of content...

It’s no secret: Social media has changed the way that we access news. According to the Pew Research Center, two-thirds of Americans report getting at least some of their news on social media. Another study suggests that globally, for those under 45, online news is now...